Saturday, February 6, 2016

Compliant self-sabotage

We are so enamoured of the scientific advances our
species has accomplished, and to be sure, there are many. And many of those are
extremely significant. Splitting the atom, fusion, nuclear medicine, antibiotics,
micro-surgeries, even genetics, including the presence or absence of a gene
that assists in the process of discarding brain material in adolescence that
paves the way away from schizophrenia….these are just some of the wonders of
our many highly sophisticated laboratories and their resident scholars and
researchers. Many corporate entities vie for the opportunity to fund various
experiments, in the hope that from such experiments and controlled testing will
come products and processes upon which these corporations might build their
futures through the development of market-ready applications. Universities,
too, naturally and earnestly pursue such grants, in order to stay on the
leading edge of the many curves that sustain and even enhance their reputation,
thereby potentially magnetizing additional bequests from affluent benefactors.
Professors are incentivized to research and publish papers in peer review
publications, as an integral part of the competitive process both to maintain
their tenure and to support the university’s ‘standards’ and academic
reputation.

And all of this exemplary work is within the purview
of empiricism. What is observable, and repeatable, and therefore measureable,
calculated and replicated, in blind studies that include both experimental
subjects and control subjects, is revered as the essence of the scientific
method. Theories, too, are potentially recognized in some fields like history
and philosophy and perhaps theology and religion, where a similar rigid empiricism
is less easily accessed. Documents, audio and video records, personal
interviews, diaries, letters and news reports are the grist for the scholars’
mill in these disciplines. Comparisons, language patterns and style, themes,
and the study of the exercise of power in various modes and periods are some of
the windows in these research projects.

However, with the headlong march to the sacralising
of the marketplace, and the interactions therein, linked intimately to the
technology that chases every ‘heartbeat’ of that circulation system, so much of
our cultural landscape is replete with language, attitudes, beliefs and
scientific experiments that advance our consciousness of the empirical evidence
of all aspects of our individual and collective existence, or so it would appear,
given the tidal wave of supporting evidence in both the public media and in the
scholarly journals. Even research into human behaviour, most frequently
assigned to the clinical, behavioural, adolescent, developmental, and criminal,
pharmacological psychology departments, or perhaps to the macro work of
sociologists, also deploying the scientific method in order to maintain
credibility and reliability. Cultural historians, like John Ralston Saul, are
rare and occupy rarified corners in the attics of academia, given their more
abstract and general digging into the pages of history for their observations
and conclusions.

Their observations, while relevant to a small
segment of those whose affinity leads them to such writings as his and others
of his ‘field’, do not receive nearly the attention nor the study by policy
nerds, politicians and pundits. Additionally, the work of poets and
philosophers, futurists and visionaries, even professors of religion like the
recently minted husband of the star of Madame Secretary, is too often
considered extraneous to public affairs, or even irrelevant to the cast of
characters elected to provide “leadership” in the contemporary complex world.

We face so many serious and potentially existential
threats today: including but not restricted to global warming/climate change,
nuclear proliferation especially among rogue states like North Korea, and among
terrorists like ISIS, Al-Nusra, Al-Shabbab, rising population figures that
threaten to reach 10 billion people in this century, the scourge of
non-prescription drugs (one American dies every day from heroine addiction!),
the devious and nefarious activities of human beings both in the public arena
and those less visible lurking in the darkest corners of our towns and cities,
the increasingly rampant opportunism of corporations whose products are
literally killing their innocent consumers every day (just today Honda recalled
5….yes 5 million cars worldwide, because of the faulty technology of their
Takata airbags!), the spread of viruses like Zika both through insect
infestation as well as human intercourse, and the growing spread of a migrant
population fleeing the ravages of civil war, disease, hunger and the complete
lack of opportunity for a decent life….and we merely make headlines of these
dangers, ring our hands and continue in the blind hope that some miracle will
save us from ourselves.

Has anyone given any thought to a process of
studying human attitudes/behaviours/beliefs/cultures with the same kind of
intensity, funding, respectability and urgency with which we seem so ready to
study the physical universe? Poets, since humans began to sing and to share
their songs and their stories, have been pointing penetrating eyes, minds,
hearts and intuitions at and through the most impenetrable clouds of cognition
and epistemology. However, their words and their thoughts and their sentiments
are relegated to the sideboard of the “kitchen” where traditionally only
mothers and daughters have spent any length of time. Robert Frost was,
thankfully invited to “present” his poem commemorating the inauguration of
President John F. Kennedy, as have a list of laureates following him. However,
remembered from that cold January day in 1961 are the words of the new
president “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask rather what you can do
for your country!” Exemplary rhetoric, to be sure, memorable undoubtedly and
worthy of repetition. However, the public consciousness today needs, indeed
craves, the penetrating insights of the most challenging writers, thinkers,
poets, philosophers, eccentrics, and artists, and as history demonstrates,
merely a miniscule segment of any modern culture keeps track of such insights.
And clearly the contemporary media is both disinterested and tone deaf on the
matters of the poet’s art. Occasionally, the presentation of arts awards like
the Giller Prize for Canadian writing offer a tuxedo-gowned ballroom and the
appropriate cast of elite characters to grace the ambience of “the artists”
whose work is being heralded. Nevertheless, such “platinum” ostentation, while
paying public homage to the writers and their latest work, does little to make
the more nuanced and complicated insights of a Margaret Atwood or a Michael
Ondaatje, or previously a Pratt or a Northrop Frye to a public starved of the
intellectual and the emotional, nourishment that can and does emerge from the
pages of a vibrant and risk-taking imagination.

I once heard a retired mid-to-low-level bureaucrat
from the city of Toronto judge those then offering courses in entrepreneurship,
sarcastically wondering how former civic employees could possibly have anything
valid and relevant to offer aspiring and incipient entrepreneurs. It is not
only young entrepreneurs who suffer the boredom of instruction from those with
little or no imagination and even less courage and muscle for risk-taking.
There is a universe of young minds in most Canadian schools, colleges and
universities who suffer the indignity of having to listen to instructors whose
range of imagination and experience is so bounded by their fear of not fitting
in, and their dependence on the security of their tenure and their public
reputations, that they serve their clients only those morsels ofcognition that fit the curricular demands of
their provincial overlords, themselves terrified of reaching too far “outside
the lines” that circumscribe something commonly known as ‘political correctness’.

Little wonder, the world suffers from both
intellectual brain obstruction and rigor-mortis of the imagination. We have bound
ourselves in such tiny and tightly bound boxes of acceptable thought,
behaviour, belief and activities (save and except the emerging “extreme” activities
of the daredevils of the physical universe) that we have become slaves of
political correctness and intellectual conventionality.

There is a kind of classical conditioning that
pervades the academic theatre, the corporate theatre, the political theatre, the
religious theatre and the street theatre. Through an embedded process of
framing problems as outside of human beings, like diseases that invade the
human body, and then proposing methods and means of ‘attacking’ those problems,
we have come to accept the conventional wisdom that those parameters are the
extent of our intellectual and our imaginative capacity. It is our wallowing in
a mind-set of extrinsics while avoiding/denying our intimate connection both to
the roots of many of our problems and thereby to the resolutions of many of
those problems that limitsthe access to
and the expression of our integrity, and that closed door precludes more
effective and collaborative and immediate resolutions.

Human greed, human insolence, human insouciance, human
pride, human negligence, human self-loathing, human narcissism, human lies,
human neuroticism…..these are just some of the many “elements” in a table of
human realities, just like the various elements depicted in the “table of elements”
in the chemical universe that we tend to overlook and to minimize and to
distort in our portrayal of too many issues facing the whole of humanity. In
short, human complicity, not necessarily criminal complicity, (there are
elaborate criminal codes that provide sanctions and processes to attempt to
control criminal behaviour in most developed countries), is the essential
component of too many of our many issues.

We design too many of our “solutions” upon faulty
and self-sabotaging foundations:

To wit: health care systems that are based on the
remuneration of our doctors through a calculation dependent on the number of
visits with patients, and not on the quality of those visits, the outcomes of
those visits, and the health of the patients who do not need those visits.

To wit: a tax system that fosters and enhances the
wealth and the status and the political power of those with either inherited or
“earned” wealth, when we know that wealth is not a measure of the “value” of
the contribution of those people to the goal of improving the health of our
civilization.

To wit: a labour code that favours the employer
whose “investment” contribution to the enterprise is valued much more highly
than the “worker” efforts that sustain that enterprise.

To wit: an education system that purports to
champion ingenuity, creativity and risk-taking while deploying both teachers
and a political culture that demand no mistakes, and that all mistakes be
minimized to protect the public “reputation” of both the leaders of that system
and the organization itself. A neurotic education system will, by definition,
generate students who find and pursue the most risk-free paths to further
education and career advancement. In addition, the education system also
fosters a culture that mimics the corporate pursuit of individual profit,
status and political influence, based on some limiting definition of “expertise”
in ever-narrowing fields of inquiry.

To wit: a religious system that champions
literalism, racism, sexism, bigotry, and the size of individual and corporate
financial contributions, as well as infighting over dogma, the purity of
ethical rigidity especially in our definition of the beginning of life, the depravity
of the murderer, the championing of the incarceration system as our best “control”
device when dealing with criminal behaviour, and not rehabilitation. Paying lip-service
to forgiveness, tokenism in the extension of a helping hand to those in
desperate circumstances, regardless of the history of those circumstances,
giant investment accounts, and the elevation of a kind of corporate status
similar to that of the corporate culture belie the potential for service and
ministry so essential in a world divided into have’s and have-not’s.

To wit: a belated and swiss-cheese assault on global
warming and climate change that focuses on the kind of billions needed to clean
the environments of the developing world when the real culprits for decades
have been the corporate controllers in the developed countries and measuring
the reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and not in humans whose lives
have significantly changed to comport with the requirements of leaving our
grandchildren clean air, water and land for their survival.

To wit: a massive “defensive” arsenal of nuclear
weapons in too many countries, including those countries verging on their own
failure, and terrorist groups avaricious in their pursuit of the acquisition of
such weapons, when we all know that the first deployment of any of these
weapons would signal a devastating and unpredictable result, the limits of
which no one is prepared to contemplate. In addition, the conventional
mentality of all “great powers” is to significantly grow their military
arsenals annually, while the numbers of starving and homeless in those
countries, not to mention the infusion of hundreds of thousands of migrants
into many developed countries, grows exponentially.

To wit: a corporate marketing strategy, supported by
the “job creation” mantra that rains down on unsuspecting, naïve and trusting
consumers faulty products under faulty warranties at exaggerated profits, as
the “growth of the economy” and supplements this self-sabotaging premise with
deals like the TransPacificPartnership that advance the agenda of the corporate
moguls, now ‘siamesed’ with the government of countries like China where the
boundary between company and government is so blurred as to be imperceptible.

To wit: a pharmaceutical industry that purports to “heal”
the sick, while inflicting “regulated and endorsed” drugs without appropriate
controls and trials, for the real purpose of generating exorbitant profits for
their investors, exemplified by one former “financial services worker” who
ballooned the price of one drug some 5000 times upon the takeover of a company
owning the product, and then refused to testify, pleading the “Fifth” in
Congress, and while exiting, called the members “imbeciles”.

To wit: a credit card and banking system (can you
hear the howls of protest from both sectors in protest of their linkage as
one?) that purports to “serve” clients with loans and mortgages at interest
rates that generate billions in quarterly profits, as a signal that the “banking
system” in both healthy and secure, and then, in a minimal emergency, “finds”
ways to re-arrange the portfolio of loans and accounts to seem eminently fair
and kind.

To wit: a conventional language of advertising and
news reporting that so embraces the euphemism and the gentile cover for the
most outrageous behaviour of the very companies and executive suites whose
occupants are the owners of those media outlets, dependent on the
ratings/investment/dividend equations for their success…in effect provide cover
for the “deception” and the “lying” and the sophisticated and elevated
distancing of the political class from the full realities of their
responsibilities.

To wit: a gerrymandered and financed election system
that so supports the re-election of well over 90% of incumbents (in the United
States) and so embraces “name brand” candidates with fiscal resources to afford
to become political candidates, that reinforces the status quo, at the expense
of overhaul in the very premises that point the system in the direction of the
wealthy and the powerful, all of which portends its own demise, so based on
faulty, if cosmetically satisfying water-cooler conversations and media coverage.

To wit: a food production, distribution and marketing
system that purports to keep us healthy while piling on pounds and cardiac
arrests with tonnes of sodium and sugar, “for good taste,” thereby intimately and
almost reverentially supporting the deception implicit in its very survival as
an industry. Just today, we learn that the new kale salad at McDonalds has more
calories and sodium that a double Big Mac.

It was Scott Peck who uncovered the denial of all
occupants of offices in the Pentagon for responsibility for the My Lai massacre
in the Vietnam conflict; today, Peck would be hard pressed to find even the
lowest occupant of the occupational ladder willing to take responsibility for
the most minimal of conscious errors, protesting, as a matter of convenience
and of denial, any wrongdoing or even any evidence that would link the
wrongdoing to his/her name. The state of denial is so prevalent, and grows more
rapidly than the Zika virus, and we have not, and are not seemingly interested
in developing a strategy for alerting ourselves to our own complicity in our
self-sabotage, and thereafter for a concerted, collaborative and adventurous
series of strategies and tactics that work toward the kind of integrity,
courage and commitment to our very survival, for which our grandchildren plead.